Mobile puzzles

October 14, 2005 | Comments

Russ has posted re his new-found love of Sudoku, which prompts me to promote our mobile puzzles.

We launched Sudoku in August, and Crosswords very quietly about 10 days ago. The former was promoted throughout the national press for a couple of weeks, the latter just in Puzzlers magazines (so far). One day I'll write about our experiences promoting these games, what works and what doesn't.

If you're in the UK, text CROSSWORD or SUDOKU to 62899. If you want a hard or medium-difficulty Sudoku, stick HARD or MEDIUM in the message too. We support about 40 different handsets, if we don't support you now then we will do soon. Oh, and we've got hundreds of puzzles online and will make sure you never get the same one twice. We're big on customer care, it's important.

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The first time you get either puzzle, you won't be charged (and there's no risk in finding out whether we have a version for your phone). Thereafter it's 25p a play, a world away from the £4.50 for a 10-pack that most folks charge... we want to encourage you to play. We think you'll like it enough to come back ;)

Features: you can pencil in numbers, cheat (but you pay a time penalty!), and enter an online league after you've finished (or even if you don't manage it). We also think these games look rather smart too.

We've learnt so much doing this. I'll be sharing what I can of this learning (hey, much of it is client confidential) at World Telemedia in November.

Apologies to anyone outside the UK - we don't distribute to you yet. If you're in the industry and would like to see some examples of our work, drop me an email or leave a comment here and I'll get something to you.

There's nothing new

October 13, 2005 | Comments


I thought I'd blogged this when I first saw it (and hey maybe I had), but a conversation with Mark yesterday brought up this photo which I took earlier this year at the Bradford Museum of Photography. It's a series of 1920s Cameras For Girls but what struck me was the ipoddity of these hand-crafted beauties...

Set Your Priorities

October 13, 2005 | Comments

Set Your Priorities: "Once again, it's really messy, it's not exact, and it doesn't matter. You're not making a schedule today: you're just prioritizing. "

I-Mode in the UK

October 13, 2005 | Comments


I saw this advert on the tube yesterday. By Christ it scared me. Have they learned nothing from the Silver Surfer?

Even if I-mode is "faster than WAP", does this really matter? Does associating I-mode with WAP generate any sort of resonance with customers? Are the public at large sitting at home desperately wishing that WAP were faster? I think not.

Coincidentally, yesterday I paid a visit to some chums in Slough and saw I-mode for the first time, and it looks very interesting. I can't put my finger on why - the whole just seems like more than the sum of it's parts. And they've managed to get a decent-looking handset out of NEC, which is massively impressive too.

I'm NDAd so can't talk about one of the aspects of it that really got me excited, but the I-Mail product - which I believe will let content providers message I-mode customers using email and avoiding per-message charges - knocks aside one of the fundamental assumptions us mobile folks make when we're thinking of services and opens up a whole raft of opportunities.

Even if I-mode itself doesn't generate massive subscriber levels, it might push the rest of the UK mobile industry in the right direction.

League Against Tedium

October 13, 2005 | Comments

The League Against Tedium: "People rarely listen to what I say. I do not expect them to. One cannot expect dwarves to queue for the rack."